POMO

Dumb from head to toe, and yet at the end it pretends to have a "big idea".

A bigger budget and a more effectively rendered battle would have elevated The King, but even without those things, this is an outstanding film. The slow-paced, psychologically meticulous narrative follows the transformation of a bohemian pacifist’s way of thinking and attitude into that of a cruel warrior who wants to uphold his honor. Friendship, ambition, intrigue and the loss of something held dear in exchange for something less valuable but predestined by fate. At the same time, the English and French “political nature” is nicely depicted in historical terms. All four of the key roles are played by great actors. As co-writer and co-producer, Edgerton is the father of this work. Excellent.

As a horror movie, Christine is not entirely scary. It could be that it’s just not possible to make a serious horror flick about an old red car that, like a Transformer, repairs itself when it gets damaged. But you will enjoy the one scare and the suspense, which is surprisingly effective for such an absurd subject. Carpenter also succeeded in capturing the bizarre charm of the subject matter, which is a typical feature of King’s books. Here it's the detailed focus on a young outsider’s fetishistic love for a car, which becomes his idol and helps him to find himself. Christine is also built on and works well with the characters, their transformation, the motif of trying to save a friend and so on, narrative parameters that contemporary horror filmmakers rather don’t give a damn about.

Perhaps an exceedingly improbable tangle of fucked-up life stories, accompanied by a needlessly frequent and literal voice-over. There are already several important connections between those estimable life stories in the narrative and the constant, all-explaining voice-over robs the viewer of their own thought-provoking consideration. Literal explanations of the characters’ feelings have a place in a book, where we don’t see the characters’ faces. Here it is too much and unnecessary. If, however, you accept this excessively lazy, monotonously flowing narrative, you’re in for a solid drama with a lot of suffering, the ugly fruits of religious fanaticism, slightly cynical use of laid-back period music (which evokes the Coen brothers) and excellent actors. Particularly Jason Clarke and Pattinson excel in their negative supporting roles, which are atypical of them. Paradoxically, I found Tom Holland’s main character to be lacking in expressiveness, which I wouldn’t blame on him as an actor, but on the director. Three and a half stars.

A banal plot in which two characters (a man and a woman with chemistry) speak normally and everyone else in such coded language that it could be developed without conspicuous illogic into a seemingly ultra-sophisticated spectacle packed with unexpected situations and unprecedented visual attractions. Or rather, one unprecedented attraction, when in one shot some characters run forward and others backwards and it looks neither ridiculous nor strange, but on the contrary, fresh and spectacular. Nolan clearly and meaningfully declared his fetish for time paradoxes in Inception and now he’s merely changing it up on other theoretical levels and interweaving it with new sub-genre elements (in this case, Bond films). And he increasingly equivocates, pretends and artificially complicates things as much as possible in order to push everything farther and higher than last time, while cleverly hiding the absence of a supporting foundation for the plot (which was dreams in Inception). Winking at the thoughtful viewer with lines like "You have no idea what I'm talking about...” Answer: “No, but it sounds extremely important" can thus be understood as passing the buck, but I see it rather as a plea for leniency towards the deliberate gaps in logic and, conversely, appreciation of his courage and exceptional genre progressiveness. Tenet is a techno-thriller from another dimension. In the context of the viewer’s state of mind induced by the film, the last scene with Pattinson reminded me of Casper Van Dien in Starship Troopers, which almost made me laugh in places with its cheesy absurdity. Actually, that was the best thing that could have happened to me with Tenet, if I'm supposed to like it. P.S. Göransson’s music is outstanding, as it gives the film a more energetic and innovative tone than we would expect from Zimmer (whose music, however, would be more enjoyable to listen to on its own).

With its playful and brisk narrative together with good acting performances, I Love You Phillip Morris is entertaining, but in the last quarter of the film, it becomes boring due to the repetitive arrests, incarcerations and escapes and, as a whole, the film seems much longer than it is. There is an overabundance of comic and kitschy romantically tinged gay scenes, especially in the first half, and they come across as bizarre when performed by Carrey and McGregor, though it’s possible to get used to them.

I truly expected something deeper from the Danes than a revenge shoot ’em up with Bay-esque circling cameras and ostentatiously painted panoramas and digital fire. But it was actually entertaining, as the all-telling looks of Mikkelsen and Eva Green gave the film a dose of fatefulness even without speaking.

The socio-legal conflict between two families results in a tenser drama than you would expect. However, the film reaches its well-thought-out climax somewhat spontaneously, without any build-up or logic, which makes it either improbable or told with insufficiently precise exposition (since it is a real story, the latter is more likely).

True Story is a watchable but dubiously cast and not very exciting variation on Primal Fear, with just a hint of Shutter Island. But with only part of the subject matter taken from both of those films. They would have done better if they’d had their buddy Seth Rogen sit as the judge and get everyone thoroughly high.

The Mountain is a nice story about the characters of very different brothers whose complicated coexistence plays out as a drama set high up in the mountains. The film is both spectacular and intimate, as well as illogical in the continuity of the scenes during the ascent. In individual passages, however, it does well with its detailed depiction of the technical aspects of climbing the old-fashioned way – with a pick instead of an ice axe and a hammer from the barn for driving belay anchors into the rock face. The film’s driving force is Spencer Tracy as a grandfather beaten down by life and conscious of the hierarchy of values. The film wouldn’t have had such soul with a less committed actor.